everything

Vendettas.

My intention was to head to Boston today to Occupy our fair city of tea parties and revolution, but it is dreary and raining and I know, I know, I am lame and so not hardcore. I’ll embrace my role as an armchair activist.

Until I get off my tuchas (sp?), look what’s lacking at Occupies Maine and Baltimore.

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One thought on “Vendettas.”

This is in reference to the Satan mask in three of the four photos:
I probably read this somewhere: mystery-murders: witch-burnings, serial-killings, mass-murders, genocide: are not one or more persons acting on a grudge against another person or persons. Although dehumanization is part of the process of murdering anyone, these go far beyond reducing someone to a dollar amount or “career move”. These are sacrifices: “holy makings”: but in reverse. The victim is reduced–or elevated–to an evil spirit.
This marks these crimes’ irrational motivation: how can you burn or machine-gun a spirit?
When a US soldier breaks a soda bottle over the head of a randomly-encountered “Hajji” in the streets of an Iraqi city, in the immediate aftermath of the US invasion (as reported by his colleague in a letter published in the NY Times at that time), and does so repeatedly, as part of his routine vehicular patrols, using bottles gathered in preparation (the old-style, heavy glass soda bottle), he is enacting a religious ritual. He is making the invasion okay. He is “laying the ghost”. He is taking US racism and turning it on its head. Acting on a spiritual impulse of the very type that he imagines himself to be exorcising, he elevates Iraqis to angels existing outside space or time, after which transformation the actual body is trash–an obscene (I think this Latin term stems from the idea of something that is too shameful to look at) poster depicting the demonic spirit–to be torn-down, crumpled up, and kicked aside. The irony here is, what, the irony here is the mark of Satan, “the enemy”, the “diabolical” (“thrown across”) one: evil as the “absence of good” (Augustine), the repudiation of reason.
I’d bet that every guy I ever heard refer to Iraqis as Hajjis (they–we–also do this in Afghanistan, I’m told) would say, “Hey, I never heard anybody complain.”